I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
